6
THE LIZARD’S MOUTH
Graham Pressley contended that Ryan Hoyt forced him to come along on a ride out to the mountainous area around Santa Barbara. Graham was aware that Hoyt had a gun, and he had no idea if Hoyt was ready to use it or not. According to Graham, Ryan Hoyt wanted him to find a nice isolated spot out in the Santa Ynez Mountains, and Graham thought that a spot he knew might fit the bill. It was called the Lizard’s Mouth, because of a rock formation there that did look like a lizard with its mouth open as if to catch its prey. The Lizard’s Mouth was a party spot for teens, and Graham had been there before.
Graham and Ryan traveled up Highway 154 toward San Marcos Pass, then went onto narrow, winding West Camino Cielo Road. This small road ran along the side of the Santa Ynez Mountains in snakelike curves, with beautiful views of the ocean and Santa Barbara by day. But now, it was near midnight, and the road was enveloped in darkness with no other vehicles on its pavement. Graham guided the car up to an area near a gun club, which was at a distance from any dwellings, and then he and Ryan got out and hiked through the brush toward the Lizard’s Mouth. Ryan had Jesse James Hollywood’s TEC-9 and a shovel with him, and Graham also had a shovel. According to Graham, once they reached an area near the Lizard’s Mouth, Ryan Hoyt forced him to start digging a hole.
According to Graham, Hoyt told him, “You’d better start digging, if you know what’s good for you.” The ground was rocky and hard near the Lizard’s Mouth, so Pressley and Hoyt moved about five hundred feet away to where the ground was softer. Even then, Graham only managed to dig a hole about a foot and a half deep, and six to seven feet long. He said later that he wasn’t sure if he was digging his own grave. Graham recalled, “I thought maybe this person wanted to get rid of me, because I’d become a liability.”
It wasn’t perfect, but Ryan decided it was deep enough to hold the body of a fifteen-year-old boy. When he told Pressley to quit digging and to come along with him back to the car, Pressley said he felt a rush of relief wash over him that he wasn’t going to die at that moment. He knew that the hole he had just dug was not intended for him.
Probably around 1:00 A.M., August 9, Ryan Hoyt and Graham Pressley returned to the Lemon Tree Inn. Incredibly, Ryan left Pressley in the car by himself, and even though Pressley guessed what was coming next, he didn’t bolt. According to Pressley, Ryan Hoyt even left the TEC-9 in the trunk of the car at that time. Pressley would say later that he was too afraid to tell Nick what was going to happen, or even leave himself, certain that if he did, Hoyt would track him down and kill him and his family.
At least that’s what Graham Pressley said later. Rugge, who was still in the room with Nick, had a very different story. He said, “Graham walked in first, with really rosy cheeks, like he was holding back his emotions. I just looked at him, and he looked at me, and we just caught each other’s eyes. It’s hard to describe. At that point Hoyt came in and shook Nick’s feet and woke him up. It was hard to get him up. When he got up, we went outside, and I was in front, Graham behind me, Nick behind Graham and then Hoyt. I saw Hoyt had the blue bag in his hand at that time. He pointed to where his car was parked, and we all went over there. It was real quiet at that time. I was scared and didn’t know what to think.
“We got in and Ryan Hoyt drove, because I couldn’t drive a stick. I sat shotgun, Graham was behind Hoyt, and Nick was behind me. I asked Hoyt where we were going, but he didn’t say anything. Then I asked Graham. At first he didn’t answer me. So I said again, ‘Graham, where are we going?’ Graham turned to me like he was crying, and he said, ‘We’re going to Lizard’s Mouth.’ Then everything went dead again. Just quiet.” Rugge added that Nick didn’t say a word on the ride, and that he “looked scared.”
Graham Pressley also commented later about the drive up to Lizard’s Mouth, and remarked on the unearthly quiet in the car. He said there was an incredible tension within the vehicle, but that neither he nor Rugge warned Nick about what was going to take place. As far as he knew, Nick was still under the illusion that someone was coming up there to take him home to West Hills. Graham even held the slim hope that the hole he had just dug was only intended to scare Nick into remaining silent about what had happened to him.
After they reached the parking spot near the gun club, there would be various versions of what happened next, and depending on which version was true, it would have grave implications for Graham Pressley later. What came to light, years later, is most likely what occurred, and by then, even Pressley would admit to it. He said that he guided the others up the trail until they heard a young man and woman off in the distance. These two seemed to be having a good time up there. As the couple walked back toward the road, they passed Pressley, Nick, Rugge and Hoyt, who had moved off to the side of the narrow trail. The couple said “good-bye” to the four young men and moved off down the trail. At that point “I was sitting on a rock and just lost it. I refused to move any farther. They just left me there, and went on without me,” Pressley said later.
In Jesse Rugge’s version of events, it was Graham Pressley who led the others over the rough and broken ground, sometime between two-thirty and three A.M., in the early-morning hours of August 9, all the way to the grave. Rugge said, “Hoyt just told us, ‘Let’s go,’ and Graham took the lead. Then it was Nick, myself and Hoyt behind me. Only Hoyt had a flashlight.” But even though Rugge swore to this version, Pressley’s seems to be the most accurate, where he sat on the rock near the trail and refused to go up to where he had dug the hole.
Rugge estimated it took anywhere from five to ten minutes to get to where Hoyt wanted them to go. Rugge said of the area, “We sat down on these plane of rocks for a while. Nick sat down on a rock, Graham sat down on a rock and I stood facing Graham. Hoyt was behind me, looking at Nick. I believe the gun was in the bag then, and he was holding the bag at all times.
“Hoyt turned to me and told me to tape up Nick, and I said no. He looked at me with an angry look. Nick just sat there quietly, with his head down. Graham was lying on a rock, and then he just disappeared like a ghost.” (Rugge seems to have confused the time line. Pressley was on that rock before making it all the way to the grave site.)
“Hoyt told Nick to put his hands behind his back, and Nick did. Then Hoyt taped him up. After that, Hoyt told him to get up and to walk. Hoyt walked him over, on a flat rock, and the rock dropped out onto a flat dirt area and he walked out on this dirt.”
Rugge claimed that he never saw Nick’s mouth being taped up, but he said he heard Hoyt pulling out some duct tape, ripping it off and doing something with it. To his ear, it sounded like duct tape was being applied to Nick, and later he mentioned it being placed around Nick’s mouth.
Rugge would claim later that he still believed that Ryan Hoyt was only trying to scare Nick into not talking—until the next few unforgettable seconds. Rugge said he was sitting on a rock nearby when Hoyt raised the shovel and whacked Nick in the head with it. The sound was very distinct in the otherwise silent night. The boy tumbled over, and Rugge presumed that Nick had been knocked out.
According to Rugge, “Hoyt picked Nick up and dragged him over to a hole. He was holding him under the arms and was dragging him faceup.” Rugge said he couldn’t see where Hoyt placed him, but that it was probably in the hole that Pressley had dug earlier that night.
Then, under the twinkling stars and pale moon, Ryan Hoyt raised the pistol and pressed his finger down on the trigger. It sprayed nine bullets into Nick’s body, and only stopped at nine because it became jammed. Nick was hit in the stomach, neck, chest and chin—dying almost instantly.
After the thunderous roar of the fusillade, there was an eerie silence. According to one version, Hoyt ordered Rugge to throw dirt onto Nick’s body, but Rugge only managed to throw one shovelful on the boy before getting sick and vomiting nearby. Seeing that Rugge wasn’t up to the task, Hoyt started shoveling dirt into the grave. He did one more odd thing as well—he threw the TEC-9 into the grave with Nick. Then Hoyt shoveled more dirt into the hole and piled some branches and twigs there. It was a shoddy job at best, with parts of Nick’s body still exposed, but at 3:00 A.M., in the dark, it might have seemed okay to Ryan Hoyt.
Jesse Rugge and Ryan Hoyt walked back down the trail to the car, and Rugge was almost in a daze. Once again, Pressley could have taken off on his own during the time the other two were gone, but he did not. He was still there when the other two returned, minus Nick Markowitz. Hoyt had been very quiet on the trip down the hill to the car, but once he reached it, he seemed pleased at what he had accomplished. Pressley remembered him saying, “That’s the first time I ever did anybody. I didn’t know he would go so quick.” Graham Pressley was speechless.
Rugge would remember Hoyt joking about him vomiting and mocking him in front of Pressley. “Then he lit a cigarette, and that was it. We just drove away.”
Hoyt drove back to the Lemon Tree and Graham Pressley went inside the room without comment. He was told to pay for the room when he checked out the following morning. And Pressley’s mom, having fallen asleep earlier in the night, didn’t even realize he’d missed his 11:00 P.M. curfew and wasn’t home. She had no idea that he wasn’t there until Graham phoned her the next morning, at six o’clock, from the Lemon Tree, asking for a ride home.
When Christina Pressley picked him up, Graham was very quiet in the car and looked pale. She asked him if he was all right, and Graham responded that he didn’t feel well and he hadn’t slept much that night. Christina would recall later, “He was clearly sick or shaken, or something was very wrong.”
As far as the others went, Rugge said, “Hoyt drove me to Los Angeles. It was quiet in the car. Lots of smoking cigarettes. We didn’t talk about the killing of Nick. It was about seven forty-five A.M. when we got to my mom’s place. I told him to drop me off there.”
Rugge said later that there weren’t any plans made to throw law enforcement off track. No contingency plans to leave the area or hide out. No plans at all. Rugge said Ryan Hoyt just let him off and drove away.
When Rugge went in the door, he said that his stepdad, Scott, was there. “I was really quiet. I walked to the room I stayed in, waited until he was done with his stuff, and when he left, I just drank a lot of water. A lot of fluids. I was sick, man. I was scared. Scared of Hoyt. Scared of going to prison. Scared for what someone else had done.”
According to Kelly Carpenter, she spoke in person with Graham Pressley at around 11:00 A.M. on Wednesday, August 9, and he lied to her, saying that Jesse Hollywood had come to the Lemon Tree Inn after she, Natasha Adams and Nathan Appleton had left, and scared Nick with a gun to keep him quiet. Pressley told her it was a TEC-9 and that it “was a really gnarly gun and shot, like, three bullets at a time.” Carpenter added, “Graham told me that he drove Jesse Rugge, Nick Markowitz, Jesse Hollywood and a friend down to L.A., and so we were completely clear now.”
Natasha Adams was nearby, and either she or Carpenter asked Pressley how he had taken them home, since he didn’t have a car. Carpenter said, “What he told me was that Jesse Hollywood had purchased a van for five hundred dollars for this use, only to drive down to L.A. and drive back up.” She didn’t ask Graham why Jesse Hollywood would rent a van in Santa Barbara if it had to be brought back there and not West Hills. Nor did the name Ryan Hoyt ever come up in the conversation with Pressley or anything about Lizard’s Mouth. She recalled, however, about Pressley’s demeanor that morning. “He was very tired and very flustered and overwhelmed.”
Ryan Hoyt would later relate what he did after his return from Santa Barbara. By that point, however, Hoyt was telling a story in which he did not even accompany Pressley and Rugge to Lizard’s Mouth, much less murder Nick. Though that is at variance with what Rugge and Pressley said, some topics Hoyt did speak about in the days after Nick was murdered seem to be valid. Hoyt recalled, “Jesse Rugge and I drove out of Santa Barbara and took Highway 101 straight back. We stopped at a McDonald’s in the Valley to get something to eat. I was starving. Then I dropped Jesse Rugge off at his mom’s house and returned to my grandmother’s place. I still had Casey Sheehan’s car. I showered, shaved and relaxed. About two hours later, I called Rugge to see how he was doing.”
Even before Kelly Carpenter had her talk with Graham Pressley, or Hoyt and Rugge made their way back to Los Angeles, Jack Hollywood had been trying to contact Jesse Hollywood on the night of Tuesday, August 8, and into the early hours of Wednesday, August 9. His quest to find Jesse was still occurring around the time that Nick was being led to his death up at Lizard’s Mouth.
Jack recalled, “After driving back from Big Sur, I got ahold of my son by phone when I got really close, and he finally said that he was at Michelle’s house. I called him from some city between Santa Barbara and Ventura. I didn’t go into specifics, I just said, ‘I want to talk to you.’ He said, ‘Okay, but it’s kind of late.’ I said, ‘Well, you know, I want to talk to you.’ So he just told me that he was at Michelle’s house and how to get there, since I’d never been there. Her house is in Calabasas.
“It took me about an hour to get from where I called to Michelle’s house. It was, like, one in the morning when I got there, and Michelle was sleeping. My wife was out in the car sleeping, and Michelle’s parents weren’t there. The conversation I had with Jesse was in the living room. He was kind of evasive. He seemed scared and confused. He indicated that some of his friends were holding a kid, and he was worried that they were in some kind of trouble. But he said the kid was just up there having ribs and drinking beers with some of his friends. And he wouldn’t tell me who they were. And that was pretty much it. He was kind of acting like, ‘How come you’re here? I don’t want you involved in this!’ But he seemed pretty shook-up.”
It’s not certain at that point if Jack Hollywood believed his son. Asked later in court if he thought Jesse was involved in some kind of criminal activity, Jack answered, “Yes.”
Jack continued, “I said, ‘What happened here?’ I really didn’t have a lot of information. I just got a kind of vague picture that these guys had gotten involved in something, and I didn’t know exactly what it was. I was trying to find things out, and he was scared, and he was evasive. He was kind of ticked off that I found out, and he didn’t want me to know. He said things were probably all right now, and the kid had probably been let go, but he (Jesse) could possibly get into trouble because he was somehow involved when they took the kid.
“I was pressing, and saying, ‘Where is the guy? Let’s get him out of there. Let’s make sure nothing happens.’ And Jesse said that he’d tried all night to get ahold of them at the place where the guy was, and they must have gone somewhere else, or else they just let him go and they just took off. At that point I didn’t know who they were.
“It was, like, two o’clock now, and I said, ‘I’ve got to get some sleep.’ So I said, ‘I want to see you in the morning. I want to come over in the morning and let’s make sure that everything is okay. That we can help this guy out.’
“I dropped my wife at home and then drove over to John Roberts’s house. I asked him what he thought. He said the same thing that I’d heard. That some friends of Jesse’s had taken some kid, because, I guess, they had some kind of beef with the kid’s brother. He said the kid was somewhere at someone’s house. He gave me the same picture about them up drinking and partying, but they were worried that when they let the guy go, that they were all going to get arrested. Roberts said he got this information from Steve Hogg. He was kind of the position of ‘let’s make sure that he’s let go.’”
John Roberts would later recall of this visit with Jack Hollywood that not only was he there, but Laurie Hollywood was as well. Roberts said later, “They drove up to my house, about two in the morning. And they were in pieces. Absolute pieces. Emotionally—they just couldn’t handle it. Jack was crying. She was crying. ‘Upset’ would be a word that was kind of the low scale to what they were.
“I told them I’d been to Steve’s house and told them that we had to find Jesse in order to find where the kid was. Steve Hogg had said that if we got the boy, the child, safely away quickly, before any damage was done to him, that he might be able to get Jesse off with a short-sentence prison term. But he was going to have to go to prison.”
Later on in the morning of August 9, Jack Hollywood and John Roberts went to see Jesse Hollywood in person at Michelle’s parents’ house. As Jack recalled, “Michelle was in the house and Jesse and I were out on the back porch. It was around eleven A.M. I wanted to know where the kid was at, and how do we get ahold of him. Jesse wouldn’t say anything with John there, but he gave me a pager number. Jesse told me, ‘This is Ryan Hoyt’s number, and he’ll know where the guy is, and you guys can go get him.’”
What John Roberts recalled of this meeting was that he went to Michelle Lasher’s residence with Jack Hollywood and “she let us in. Jesse was somewhere in the back of the house. And Jesse and Jack and I went way out in the backyard patio to talk. Both of us confronted him, and our whole argument was, number one, we had to know where the child was, and number two, that we wanted him to go to Steve Hogg and have Steve Hogg walk him into the police department. But he wouldn’t do it. He was afraid. He didn’t think it was that consequential. He gave us no information. No conversation of any kind. It was almost like he did not at the time regard it as being a terribly serious thing.”
According to both John Roberts and Jack Hollywood, they got nothing useful out of Jesse, and they both left. Jack Hollywood said later, “I went to a pay phone at Gelson’s Market, right down the street. I paged Ryan Hoyt from there. I waited for about a minute or two and he called back. I said, ‘What’s going on?’ He said, ‘Oh, how are you doing?’ And I said, ‘Well, let’s get together. Why don’t you come over and we’ll sit down and talk.’ He didn’t say where he was, but I asked him to meet me at a park that was near to where I was, Serrania Park in Woodland Hills.
“I got there first, and then he arrived. The first thing I said was ‘What the hell’s going on with this thing? And where is the kid? Show me where he is, and John and I will go and get him.’”
Apparently, Ryan Hoyt lied, since Nick was already dead and buried. According to Jack, Hoyt said, “I don’t know how to get in touch with him.”
Jack added, “I sensed that he was pretty rattled. Again I said, ‘Let’s find out. Call whoever it is that you need to call, and you can just leave, and John and I will go and get this kid and take him home.’
“And Ryan was kind of, I don’t know how to say it, very agitated and rattled and said he couldn’t. So I said, ‘Here,’ and gave him my home phone number. I said, ‘If you find out, call me. Leave a message or I’ll be there, but you need to find out where this guy is, and we need to let him go. Whatever the consequences are from there, that’s part of the deal, but that’s what needs to happen.’
“And then he just said, ‘Okay, I’ll do that.’”
According to Jack Hollywood, at that point Ryan Holt gave him the impression that Nick Markowitz was still alive, when, in fact, he had been dead for several hours. Ryan Hoyt would later have his own take on his conversation with Jack Hollywood. Hoyt said, “I found it unusual that Jack Hollywood was paging me. He paged me maybe once or twice in the whole time I’d known him. I went to meet him at a park, and he was there waiting for me. We greeted each other in a roundabout way and he told me that Benjamin Markowitz’s brother had been taken. I was taken aback by that. I just said, ‘What are you talking about?’”
Hoyt’s whole story line later would be that he was the fall guy for what others had done, especially Jesse James Hollywood and Jesse Rugge. It was they, not he, who had been instrumental in Nick Markowitz’s murder. In fact, according to Hoyt, he would later say that he never saw Nick Markowitz at all when he went to Santa Barbara on the night of August 8.
Hoyt added, “He went on to ask me where the boy was, who did it, and so on and so forth. I replied I didn’t know. I mean, even if I did know, it was kind of out of my hands, anyway. I was kind of mad he brought me into the whole thing, but he asked me to find out what I could, and I said that I would. I was aggravated when he left. Very aggravated.
“From the park I proceeded to try and get ahold of Casey Sheehan and Jesse Hollywood. I did get ahold of Casey, and I told him I had his car. He told me the key to his house was under a cooler, so I took the car back there and went into his house. I got to his house about four-thirty P.M. After I got there, Jesse Hollywood showed up, along with Michelle Lasher and William Skidmore. I asked Jesse, ‘What is your father doing paging me?’ He just looked at me, with a smug look, and told me not to worry about it.”
On August 10, 2000, Jesse James Hollywood and Michelle Lasher went to a car dealership and Jesse leased a new Lincoln Town Car. Ryan Hoyt would not speak of this at all later, and probably didn’t know at the time that this was occurring. Ryan also related later that he was drinking a lot of booze and smoking a lot of dope on this day. All through these days after the murder of Nick on August 9, various people connected to Jesse James Hollywood would have different stories about what was occurring. And all of their stories had to be viewed in the light of how they were trying to distance themselves from what had occurred.
August 11,2000, was Ryan Hoyt’s twenty-first birthday, and he seemed to have gained new status within Jesse James Hollywood’s hierarchy. There was a party for Ryan at Casey Sheehan’s residence, attended by about thirty people. During all the drinking and smoking of dope, in one version Ryan confessed to Sheehan what he had done in regard to killing Nick Markowitz. At least that is what Sheehan said. Sheehan recalled, “Ryan didn’t show me that much emotion as far as . . . like he had a lot of guilt on his conscience or anything like that. I was still in disbelief about what had happened, what he had said to me. He said he had killed Nick Markowitz. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.”
Later, Ryan would tell a very different story about events at the party. In his version there was no mentioning by him of killing Nick or even seeing him in Santa Barbara. Ryan did say, “At the party Jesse Hollywood gave me four hundred bucks for my birthday, and he told me, ‘We’re straight. No more debt.’
“During my party we were all drinking and smoking heavily. I was kind of drunk at the time, but not severely drunk. Casey Sheehan asked me why Jack Hollywood had talked to me. I said, ‘I believe he was looking for Jesse and [was] kind of flustered.’ Then it kind of came up in a roundabout way—I kind of looked at Casey and said, ‘Do you think they killed him?’” (This meant Nick.)
Obviously, Ryan was talking about Graham Pressley and Jesse Rugge killing Nick Markowitz. Ryan added, “I thought Jesse Hollywood was involved. Jack had used the words ‘Ben’s brother had been taken.’ And I automatically assumed when somebody is taken—well, only one person can’t take another person. So I assumed it was more than one.”
Sheehan was concerned about things that had transpired because it had been his car that Nick had been driven in by the others up to where he had been killed. Sheehan confronted Jesse Hollywood about this, and Hollywood told him, “Just don’t worry about it!”
That was easier said than done. Casey Sheehan was indeed worried that Nick’s body would be discovered, and there would be a link back to him. Even though the others partied on, as if nothing had happened, Sheehan was no longer in a partying mood. As things turned out, Casey Sheehan had good reason to be concerned.
Ryan Hoyt, however, partied on as if nothing of consequence had happened. He had Sheehan take him to a skateboard and clothing shop called the 118 Board Shop. Here, Hoyt bought several items of clothing, which surprised Sheehan, since Hoyt was almost always broke.
In fact, Hoyt was so unconcerned about the events of the previous days that he related later, “On August twelfth, Brian Affronti, William Skidmore, myself, Stephen Lightfoot and a couple of other people, we all played, drank all day and went swimming in Casey Sheehan’s pool. And that day Skidmore told me that Nick Markowitz was dead.” (This was related by Hoyt when he was trying to distance himself from any part of the murder, pretending this was the first time he ever had confirmation that Nick was dead.)
“Skidmore said that Nick had been murdered. At that point things started to click together for me, what with Jack Hollywood, Jesse acting the way he was, and Casey not being surprised when I told him about my conversation with Jack Hollywood. Things just started coming together that Jesse Hollywood was involved.”
For journalists, law enforcement and everyone else looking at the events of the days after August 9, it became a maze of contradicting stories. Obviously, some people were lying, but the trick was to try and discern who was lying and who was telling the truth. Or at least parts of the truth.
What had looked like a good enough grave for Nick in the dark early-morning hours of August 9 was in fact a very slipshod affair. A few shovelfuls of dirt and branches on his body were not enough to keep away insects and flies from congregating at the area. On August 12, three days after Nick had been killed and buried, a group of hikers went up to the Lizard’s Mouth area. One of the hikers was twenty-six-year-old Darla Gacek.
It was the first time Gacek had ever been there, and she and the others scrambled around the unusual rock formations and admired the views of the city of Santa Barbara and the Pacific Ocean in the distance. Gacek was a resident of Santa Barbara who managed a dental office while studying philosophy and history at Santa Barbara City College. She and the others were amidst the rocks when they heard what they thought was the buzzing of bees. Going to investigate, they saw that it wasn’t bees but rather hundreds of flies buzzing around something that was dead.
Gacek recalled, “At first, we thought it was a dead raccoon or deer. We went there and kicked the sand [off of it] and uncovered blue jeans and part of a T-shirt. Then we knew it was a body. The whole time we were hoping it wasn’t a kid.”
Even though the stench was awful on that warm day, Gacek guarded the body while one of the hikers went for help. That hiker came upon a group of student filmmakers in the area and borrowed a cell phone from them. Then he called 911.
About being there with the body, Gacek recalled, “I was surprisingly calm. You’d think that you would freak out with a situation like that. We couldn’t see a face or hands, so we hadn’t really seen anything to humanize it.”
Interestingly enough, Gacek knew almost immediately that the body was put there because of a murder. She said later, “This was not an accident.” She knew not to touch the body or disturb the area, because her brother was a police officer in Downey and she watched television crime shows, such as NYPD Blue.
Gacek said later, “We knew we had a crime scene on our hands and we had already messed with things a little bit. We didn’t want to make it any harder on the police. And there were lots of kids hiking in that area that day, and I didn’t really want a little kid to see that.”
Gacek would also recall that as she stood guard over the body, she saw families hiking, heard the filmmakers playing music and saw butterflies flitting around. It should have been a beautiful summer day in the Santa Ynez Mountains. Instead, she was standing watch over a human body, which smelled terrible in the summer heat, with a myriad of flies buzzing around. She recalled, “It was totally surreal. It was the weirdest thing. I was thinking, ‘The world is so beautiful, but yet there’s this body that someone put here.’”
According to one account later, one of the film students actually went over and videotaped Nick in his grave. This person supposedly did that so that he could hand it over to law enforcement to show what he had viewed that day up near Lizard’s Mouth.
What had started as a supposedly one-hour hike, at around 10:30 A.M., turned into an all-day ordeal for Darla Gacek and her friends as they answered questions of Santa Barbara County Sheriff ’s Department (SBCSD) detectives who arrived on the scene. The first deputy didn’t even arrive at the remote location until two hours after the initial call to the sheriff ’s office. It would be another two hours before detectives arrived on the scene. Finally as Gacek and her friends drove home, she and the others tried to make light of the situation, because it was, in fact, “scary and creepy,” as she put it. She hoped the victim would turn out to be a “bad person,” and not some kid. “Maybe someone who got what they deserved.” In the end it wouldn’t be that way at all. Nick Markowitz did not deserve the fate he received.
Among the detectives on the case was David Danielson, who’d been a detective for four years on the force. Working with Detective Galante, he booked into evidence all the bullets, cartridge casings, live cartridges and the gun into evidence. The “projectiles”—the actual bullets that had been fired—were 9mm in caliber. Danielson noted, “All of those were in a very short distance of the actual grave site.” Of cartridge casings found near the grave site, nine were recovered on the first day of investigation. Two unspent bullets were still found within the TEC-9 semiautomatic pistol. The breech area of the gun was full of dirt, and there was one unfired live round in the chamber. Danielson noted, “Another round was jammed up in the breech area.” Eventually the TEC-9 was delivered to the Department of Justice (DOJ) criminalists in Goleta, California, near Santa Barbara.
Time and the elements had not been kind to Nick. His eyes, nose and wounds were filled with the larvae of insects, and the summer heat did not help any. It took two days for Santa Barbara homicide detectives to even figure out who he was. They were aided in this by a fingerprint that matched Nick’s arrest record for when he had been busted with marijuana.
While the detectives were at work, Casey Sheehan had another conversation with Ryan Hoyt, on Sunday, August 13, about the events that had occurred in Santa Barbara in the previous week. As Sheehan recalled, “We were just talking on the way out to see my father at the beach in Malibu, and Ryan seemed kind of scared. He just kind of brought up, ‘We took care of Nick.’ He said, ‘We took him to a ditch and shot him and put a bush over him.’”
Hoyt added that Jesse Rugge had been with him at the time, though Hoyt didn’t say who had actually pulled the trigger of the murder weapon. Sheehan and Hoyt spent the afternoon at Sheehan’s father’s house in Malibu. On the drive home Hoyt voiced his concerns with Sheehan about whether he should stick around the area or leave.
Hoyt would later have a different story about this day. He said, “Casey and I went to Malibu to his father’s house. On the way there I told Casey what Skidmore had told me the night before. We talked about the gist of it, but I never mentioned details about any murder to Casey.”
On Monday, August 14, Santa Barbara detectives drove to West Hills and pulled up near the Markowitz home a short time after 6:00 A.M. Jeff peeked out the window and told Susan that men in dark suits were at the door. He recalled later that even though they were in a daze, they gave the detectives Nick’s eleventh-grade portrait photo. The detectives showed Jeff a distinctive belt buckle, and Jeff said it was Nick’s. They showed him a ring, and Jeff said, “On my sixteenth birthday it was given to me by my parents. On Benjamin’s birthday I gave it to him, and when Nicholas was bar mitzvahed, Ben gave it to him. Nick wore it constantly. He never took it off.”
Susan would later say that the moment the detectives came to the door, she knew that Nick was gone. For all intents and purposes, the life she had lived up to that point was also gone.
Even before Nick’s body was found, Jesse James Hollywood had gone down to Palm Springs with his mother, Laurie, in his new Lincoln. It would be a while before all the details came out about this, but Jack Hollywood had some things to say about this set of days. Jack said later, “I knew that Laurie and Jesse were going to go out to lunch, and she called me and said that she was going to ride there with him. She wanted to talk to him because she had seen that he was pretty shook-up. She had talked to him on the phone previously and she knew that something was up. I still believed there was a kid missing, but I had not told her.
“Jesse drove her there in a car he had just leased. A brand-new Lincoln LS. He leased it from a dealership where a person I know, named Chris, worked. Jesse went to Palm Springs because his girlfriend Michelle was staying there. He was staying with his girlfriend, who was at some modeling convention or something. He had lunch with Laurie and dropped her off at a hotel, and then I came and picked her up. We stayed overnight and then I drove her home. I didn’t see Jesse when I was up there. Laurie and I left at six in the morning, because we have another son that we had to come home to. So I guess Jesse wanted to spend some time with his girlfriend, and I didn’t track them down.”
As to why Jack didn’t stay in the hotel where his son was staying, he later said, “I think it was booked. And Jesse was just staying in the room that Michelle already had.” Jack said he phoned that room while he was there, but no one answered the phone. (Many law enforcement officers later believed that Jack had actually seen Jesse in Palm Springs, or at least had spoken to him by phone there. They also believed Jack was helping Jesse to escape the area at that point and that he knew that Jesse had helped plan the murder of Nick Markowitz.)
On August 14, Ryan Hoyt still did not seem overly concerned, even though he knew that more and more people were aware of Nick’s death. Ryan said later, “I had met a female on my birthday, and I went out with her. We wound up back at Casey Sheehan’s house on Monday, the fourteenth. The next day I hung out with my brother most of the day.”
On August 15, a short article about the dead boy named Nick Markowitz was finally in the Santa Barbara News-Press. One of the people reading the article that day was Natasha Adams and she saw a photo of the boy she had known as Nick at Rugge’s home. Natasha was so shocked by this sudden revelation, she burst into tears. Graham Pressley had obviously lied to her about Nick Markowitz making it home safely from the motel. She soon phoned Jesse Rugge and he told her, “It’s not what you think!”
Not to be put off, Natasha headed to Rugge’s house and confronted him there. Rugge wasn’t wearing a shirt or T-shirt at the moment, and she recalled, “I could see his heart beating through his chest.”
Natasha was no fool, and she knew she had been spending two days with a boy who had been murdered after she and Kelly left the Lemon Tree Inn. Natasha went to the attorney’s office, where her mother worked, and told a lawyer there what she knew. Before going to the authorities, the lawyer drew up an immunity statement for Natasha and presented it to the Santa Barbara District Attorney’s (DA) Office. The DA’s office got in touch with law enforcement, and a grant of immunity was given to Natasha Adams to see what she could tell them. In fact, she could tell plenty, and at 4:00 P.M., August 15, 2000, she was sitting down with Santa Barbara homicide detectives giving dates, places, addresses and names. The names included Graham Pressley, Jesse Rugge, and Jesse James Hollywood.